Primeval and Other Times

THE TIME OF DIPPER THE DROWNED MAN

The Drowned Man was the soul of a peasant called Dipper. Dipper had drowned in the pond one August, when the vodka he had drunk thinned his blood too much. He was on his way back by cart from Wola when his horses were suddenly startled by moon shadows and overturned the cart. The peasant had fallen into the shallow water, and the horses had gone off in confusion. The water at the edge of the pond was warm, thanks to the August sunshine, and Dipper felt good lying in it. When the warm water got into the drunken Dipper’s lungs, he groaned, but he didn’t sober up.

Trapped in his drunken body, his intoxicated soul, a soul that hadn’t been absolved, with no map of the road onwards to God, remained like a dog by the body going cold in the bulrushes.

Such a soul is blind and helpless. It keeps stubbornly returning to the body, because it knows no other form of existence. Yet it pines for the land it comes from, where it once used to be and from which it has been expelled into the material world. It remembers it, reminisces, laments and pines, but it does not know how to get back there. It is carried on waves of despair. Then it abandons the now rotting corpse and tries to find the way on its own. It wanders about crossroads and wayside inns and tries to cadge rides by the highways. It takes on various forms. It enters into animals and things, sometimes even barely conscious people, but it never manages to settle anywhere. In the material world it is an outcast, and nor does the spirit world want it either. For to enter the spirit world it needs a map.

After this hopeless wandering the soul returns to the body or to the place where it left the body. But for it the cold, dead body is what the charred remains of a house are for a living person. The soul tries to get the dead heart and the dead, lifeless eyelids moving, but it hasn’t enough strength or determination. In keeping with divine order, the dead body says: No. Thus the person’s body becomes a hated home, and the site of the body’s death the soul’s hated prison. The Drowned Man’s soul rustles in the reeds, simulates shadows and sometimes borrows a shape from the mist, thanks to which it tries to make contact with people. It can’t understand why people avoid it, why it strikes terror in them.

So in its confusion Dipper’s soul thought that it was still Dipper.

In time, a sort of disappointment and dislike of everything human was born in Dipper’s soul. Some remains of old, human or even animal thoughts were tangled in it, some memories and images. So it believed it would re-enact the moment of disaster, the moment of Dipper’s or someone else’s death, and that this would help it to become free. That was why it wanted so badly to startle some other horses, overturn a cart and drown a person. So from the soul of Dipper the Drowned Man was born.

The Drowned Man chose as his headquarters a forest pond with a dike and a little bridge, and also the entire forest called Wodenica, and the meadows from Papiernia all the way to Wydymacz, where the mist could be especially dense. Mindless and vacant, he roamed his estates. Only sometimes, when he met a man or an animal, was he animated by a sense of anger. Then his enduring took on meaning. He would do his best at any price to cause whatever creature he encountered some evil, lesser or greater, but an evil.

The Drowned Man was always discovering his own potential anew. At first he thought he was weak and defenceless, that he was something like a flurry of wind, a light haze or a puddle of water. Then he discovered that he could move faster than anyone could imagine, just by thought alone. He thought about a place, and at once he could be there, in a flash. He also discovered that the mist obeyed him, and that he could control it as he wished. He could take strength from it, or a shape, he could move entire clouds of it, block out the sun with it, blur the horizon and extend the night. The Drowned Man realised that he was the King of the Mist, and from then on that was how he started to think of himself – the King of the Mist.

The King of the Mist felt best under water. For years on end he lay under its surface on a bed of silt and rotting leaves. From under the water he watched the changing seasons and the movements of the sun and the moon. From under the water he saw the rain, the leaves falling in autumn, the dances of summer dragonflies, people bathing, and the orange feet of wild ducks. Sometimes something woke him from this sleep-non-sleep, sometimes not. He never wondered about it. He just endured.